The Sheriff of St. Thomas (Part 7)

Dalton gave the young Jay Miller a much shorter version of the “Immaculate Deflection” story than the episode truly deserved — it had grown to be one of the legendary flukish college football plays of the 1990s — and settled back in to finish his breakfast. “Did you ever think about going pro?” Jay asked. Dalton had heard the question a thousand times. “Not in football. The supply of kickers willing to live the life of a nomad making league minimum far exceeds the number of available roster spots. I know guys who lived that life for several years, running around trying out, even making a team for a few weeks and making some good money compared to your average person, but miss one kick and you might be out of a job, immediately.”

Dalton knew that pro and college sports were alike in only one respect; it was all about winning (Despite what the schools proclaimed). But pro sports differed significantly from college sports in one way: It was all about money. You could be the best player at your position in the NFL and still get released if the owner didn’t want to pay you what you were worth. Pro players were here today, gone and forgotten tomorrow. Think about it; how many times have you been watching your favorite team and never noticed a key person from the previous season is gone until years later?

But just as soon as that unspoken thought about pro sports being all about money crossed Dalton’s mind, he sighed. Hell, college sports nowadays had changed dramatically from when he had been a “student athlete.” Who was he kidding?

Today, college sports had become a multi-billion dollar business just like the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Despite the bullshit that college administrators always pontificated about — players were there to get a degree, academics were important, and college players were amateurs and needed to stay that way, blah, blah, blah, — the obvious facts were just the opposite. Universities had changed from institutions of higher learning where free speech and thought were once championed to money-making machines that attempt to indoctrinate students politically and socially. And football and basketball players on the Division One level were literally used too make schools wealthy. It was the best labor a “scholarship” could buy, and the bang for the buck was unmatched anywhere else; for every dollar a school invested in a football or basketball athletic scholarship, the school made another 100 in return, after cashing in on ticket receipts, concession sales, jersey and merchandise profits, and television contracts with ESPN and the other networks. Just consider for instance how much money the University of Florida made selling Tim Tebow’s #15 jersey during his tenure at that school. Tebow didn’t see a dime of that money.

Dalton had heard the uninformed, stupid arguments that college athletes were paid; with a scholarship. The people who made that argument had never been on scholarship themselves and had no idea what life as a scholarship athlete was like. First, no money whatsoever actually passed through an athlete’s hands; everything was direct-billed and paid by the number-crunchers in the athletic department. Nothing was free, not even books; the academic advisor gave you a voucher with the books you needed for any given semester, and you took that voucher to the bookstore, where you gathered up your books, signed the voucher and went about your business. At the end of the semester you turned every book back in to the bookstore. If one was missing, you had to pay for it.

You ate all your meals in a cafeteria on campus, just like every other “regular” student. Dalton chuckled when he remembered on second thought there was actually some money that did “pass through his hands;” every other Sunday he and the rest of the scholarship athletes walked down the hill from their dorm to the stadium where they stood in line and picked up a check for $25.00. Its purpose? The check — which required the additional step of either cashing it or depositing it into a bank account — was for laundry and Sunday meals for two weeks, since the cafeterias were closed on Sundays. That’s right; twenty-five dollars U.S. Currency was supposed to cover your meals for two Sundays and all of your laundry for that period. (It never did.)

Now, add to this laughable cash flow situation the fact that the NCAA forbade any scholarship athlete from holding any job, part-time or otherwise, “during any semester in which he is receiving financial aid,” and it became clear that unless that athlete was from a wealthy family or had saved up a bunch of money from summer jobs — which was highly unlikely because the coaches expected that athlete to be working out all summer, not working a job — most scholarship athletes never had any spending money during the entire school year.

If you snuck a part-time job at a local grocery store, it was considered an NCAA rules violation, and you could be personally punished and your school placed on probation. So unlike their non-scholarship fellow students who could work part-time around town, scholarship athletes could not, and their lives consisted each day of a tightly controlled schedule: Going to classes (if they were so inclined), going to meetings with their coaches, going to practice, eating dinner before the cafeterias closed, squeezing in some studying (again, if they were so inclined; freshmen and sophomores had no choice and had to attend a mandatory 2-hour study hall session four nights a week), and sleeping. Then you got up the next morning and did it all over again.

Dalton figured this was all by design; the school was only interested in you as long as you were helping the program win. They would put up with a player to extreme lengths if he was performing, including hiring very good lawyers when that player got in trouble or paying off the family of some girl who the player had mistreated to keep her and her family silent. But stop performing? Forget about it; you would be tossed to the curb in a heartbeat. Dalton had seen many teammates benefit and suffer from both sides of it. And when your court years off eligibility were up? Folks quickly forgot about you. And they were less enthusiastic after your final game about hiring you back to a permanent position when they had bragged and flaunted your presence during the three previous summers when you were still a key part of the program.

Sure, if you went to class and studied and worked hard, you got your degree, that thing all the “Don’t pay college athletes” people called your pay. (Your degree was your pay, see? Even though you had earned that degree all by yourself.) But what was that degree really worth? Dalton’s helped get him into law school, but he never got any job offers based on his first degree. It made him nary a penny. And as he looked around today, he saw all kinds of kids with four-year degrees who couldn’t find a job after graduation and were working as a barista at Starbucks. Not that there was anything wrong with working at Starbucks, but Dalton figured that wasn’t the goal after getting a college degree.

“Sorry naysayers; I never got paid; except for that good old 25-buck laundry check,” Dalton mused to himself. And these college athletes today aren’t getting paid either. But they make colleges billions of dollars every single year, and when their four years are done, they’re kicked to the curb.

“But hey!” the people said. “Here’s your framed jersey as a parting gift! Never mind that we spent the last four years selling it and lining our coffers with the cash we got. We just can’t give you any of that money because it would violate NCAA regulations. But thanks for all the hard work for the program!”

It was obscene actually, and Dalton was disgusted by it all. He glanced up at the TV screen and shook his head at the ridiculous pageant of the Game Day thing. He wondered if a similar spectacle played out before the Romans packed the coliseum to watch the gladiators kill each other. Probably so, he concluded, but without the television.

As Herbstreit, Corso and the cast droned on with their banal observations in their $2,000 suits, Jay Miller went about his bar-tending duties, filling up various basins with ice, meticulously cutting up fruit garnishes for the infinite number of beach drinks that would be ordered later, stacking glasses, and refilling empty coolers with bottles of Red Stripe, Pacifico, Corona, and even Belikin— one of the best beers to be found in the Caribbean and one that was very hard to find back in the continental U.S.

Dalton polished off the last of his omelette, when — as if on cue — his electronic leash buzzed in his pocket. He looked at the number and frowned; it was Rendon, his best DEA agent. He answered. “I think you better get over here as quickly as you can,” Rendon said in a serious tone. “What is it?” Dalton asked. “I don’t want to say too much over the phone. But we caught a guy last night rolling into the Red Hook Marina with a huge load of cocaine.” “Field test?” asked Dalton. “Positive. Dude, it took us three hours to unload it. It weighed in at over a ton.”

Dalton’s eyebrows arched up ever so slightly. “Holy shit,” Dalton said. “Exactly,” countered Rendon. “Just one guy?” “One guy. We got him in the city jail right now, but we’re gonna need to get him outta there, for obvious reasons,” Rendon recommended. “He must’ve been lost or something. Why the hell would he come into one of the marinas with a load like that?” Dalton queried. “Maybe he just wanted to get caught,” offered Rendon. Dalton sighed. “Okay, I’ll be there in 20 minutes,” Dalton said and terminated the call.

They’d have to prepare a complaint and have the magistrate sign off on it to keep the guy in jail until they could present the case to the grand jury the following Friday. The problem was that a complaint had to essentially be written just like an indictment, which was a time-consuming process. There went Dalton’s Saturday at Magens Bay.

It really didn’t matter where you went; if you hired on with DOJ, this was what your life could be like, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, even on a sunny, perfect Saturday morning in St. Thomas, United States Virgin Islands. Criminals operated 24/7/365; they didn’t close up shop on Christmas or New Year’s or on their birthdays. So you had to be ready 24/7/365 too. There weren’t any true days off.

“You gotta go to work?” Jay asked from across the bar. “Yeah,” Dalton said as he stood and packed up his gear. He started to dig into his wallet to fish out a twenty for breakfast and Jay’s tip, but Jay waved him off. “Don’t worry about it. Mark said you’re good,” referring to the owner Mark Toal. “Since when?” asked Dalton, confused. “He likes having the new sheriff frequent his establishment,” Miller said with a grin. Dalton rolled his eyes, smiled back at Jay Miller, told him thanks, and walked toward his jeep, wondering slightly why Mark Toal was now giving him free breakfast.

As he walked, he thought back to the past. Years before, while he was still a military prosecutor in the early days after 9/11, he had sat across the table from some of the most dangerous terrorists on the planet, developed a rapport with them, elicited facts no intelligence agency had ever been able to pull out of them, and even convinced some of them to cooperate. Some of the cooperators had long since returned to their homelands and reformed. Others had returned to their previous ways and eventually been incinerated in drone strikes. And yet others were still down on the island. Dalton even got letters from some of them, requesting his assistance for some urgent or trivial matter. And he did what he could to help each one of them because that’s how he operated; “If you help me, then I will help you.” It was very simple really, and Dalton could never figure out why the intel people and their contractors thought they could force information out of the detainees for nothing. You had to offer people something in return and you had to deliver.

With all that as background, Dalton figured he could handle the boat driver who had either waltzed or stumbled into the Red Hook Marina with a 2,000-pound boatload of cocaine. The guidelines were merciless in drug cases. After all, if everything was as clear as Rendon had painted it, and the guy had any weapons on board, he would essentially have two choices: Cooperate with the government, or go to federal prison for at least thirty years.

Copyright© 2018, all rights reserved.

Glen Hines is the author of two books, Document and Cloudbreak, available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project. If you enjoyed this story, let him know and recommend it to others.